Arrest of South Pasadena teens revives memories for survivors of 1940 mass shooting

File - Frances McKown-Fisk, second from left, talks with family and friends during her 90th birthday party at Mijares Restaurant in Pasadena Sept. 15, 2012. McKown-Fisk is a survivor of the 1940 South Pasadena High School mass shooting from disgruntled junior high school principal Verlin Spencer that killed five and wounded one person.
Keith Birmingham — Staff photographer

The happy-at-home dad couldn’t wait to get his hands on that shiny new Plymouth or a box of Walter Hagen “core-less golf balls” — a ball as “trouble-proof as genius can devise.”

The other worried deeply about war spreading through Europe as Norway fell and Great Britain found itself square in the cross-hairs of Adolf Hitler’s plan for total domination.

Neither picture squared with the reality of a mass murder that would be committed at South Pasadena High School that very afternoon. The scars it left behind linger still in the community nearly three-quarters of a century later.

On a warm mid-spring afternoon, Verlin Spencer, principal at South Pasadena-San Marino Junior High School, went on what was described as a “berserk rampage.” He shot and killed three school administrators and two teachers before he was arrested.

Author John Church recounted the afternoon in his 1996 book “Pasadena Cowboy: Growing Up in Southern California and Montana, 1925-1947.”

“As I arrived on scene, I saw policemen with high-powered rifles mounted on small tripods on the raised lawns facing the junior high.

“Small bands of students ran from building to building looking for Spencer or possible victims. I joined my friend Bill Reeder and a couple of girls. The four of us ran into the auto shop building,” Church recalled. “At the bottom of the stairs we found the body of “Chief” Vanderlip who had been my print shop teacher. He was lying under some stored desks in a growing pool of blood.

“The enormity of the scene came into sharp focus for me,” he continued. “Feeling sick, and shocked we ran out and called to the police who quickly removed us from the premises.”

“I was out in the gym field and they held us there,” Frances McKown-Fisk said. “They couldn’t find (Spencer), and we were held until we were released by the police. It was terribly, terribly traumatic.”

Any time after when she heard of a school shooting, McKown-Fisk said it brought the tragedy that left a “pall hanging over graduation” back to life.

“I think ... of what we went through,” she said in 2012. “It was just five weeks before graduation, and the whole community shut down for a week while we attended funerals.”

Barbara Martin, another survivor of the mass shooting, said in 2012 that the incident changed sleepy South Pasadena in many ways.

“It was a terrible tragedy, and there was anger. ... For all of us it was a shocking and terrible ending to what had been a perfect, idealized school experience.”

Martin’s daughter Linzee Crowe said the tragedy lingered in her mother’s memory for many years.

“It came up in our conversations,” Crowe said. “It was really life-changing.”

Crowe said she was struck by the story of her mother’s friend and classmate, who went out of her way to comfort the wife of the shooter after his arrest.

“In spite of the horror, people had compassion back then,” Crowe said.

Contemporary news accounts described Spencer’s capture as shotgun-wielding South Pasadena police officers cornered the .22 pistol-wielding principal in the school cafeteria.

Although he shot himself too, Spencer survived. He would later tell police he remembered nothing.

“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I did it,” Spencer said.

He was sentenced to five life terms at San Quentin.

In 1970 Spencer was paroled. He lived in Hawaii under an assumed name until his death in 1991.